Past Science on the Rocks Events

September 24th, 2026

Science "PowerPoint Night"

Amelia Perry - Anoxia, and why you should care

Jake Perez - Why letters are better than numbers

Yunlang Zhang - Common myths about scuba diving

all PhD Candidates at USC Earth Sciences

Maya Gomez (USC Marine and Environmental Biology) 

Morphological Plasticity of Scleractinian Corals

Joran Landers (USC Earth Sciences)

Quantitative Paleoclimatoloty and statistically 

constraining past solar activity

Joanna Wu (UCLA Evolutionary Biology)

 Sexual dimorphism among birds and migration patterns across North America

Anthony Baltierrez (Milagro Tequila)

The food science of tequila distilling, and the practices and culture surrounding agave agriculture in Mexico. Finally, how to detect flavors in tequila through a tasting!

Dr. Chromatinta Turnter (UCLA Department of Neurology) 

How Organisms in Nature Break the Gender Binary, 

performed via drag show

Dr. Robert Ulrich (Los Angeles Pierce College)

 How Environment Impacts Identity: Biomineralizing organisms and how they tell stories about their surroundings

Dr. Harrison Martin (Caltech Geological and Planetary Sciences)

 The Hazards presented by dam failure across the United States

Dr. Kevin Milner Earthquakes (US Geological Survey)

What we know about them, their patterns, and if they can be predicted

Dr. Isabel Smith (USC Sea Grant, formerly Earth Sciences)  

Time Travel Through Rivers

Dr. Tori Cassady (UCLA, formerly USC Earth Sciences)

How Earth's 3.5 billion year old fossil record informs our understanding of evolution, and how to speak to other people about it

Devon Williams (UCLA Department of Astrophysics) 

Pointing the world's most expensive telescope at light-bending galaxies

James Pinto (USC Department of Earth Sciences)

Love is dead: Sexual dimorphism in the fossil record and how differences between males and females of extinct species can be studied.

Melonie Reyes (USC Earth Sciences)

 A day in the life of an astrobiologist and the detection of organic compounds within halite fluid inclusions

Caleb Rosen (USC Earth Sciences)

 Microbes living in the rocks of Antarctica's Mount Erebus

Thaomy Vo

How urban trees interact with the air and release volatilte organic carbon

Dr. Will Berelson

Neutralizing carbon dioxide: from science to saving the world

Both USC Department of Earth Sciences

Samuel Little (USC Department of Earth Sciences)

Anyone can be a paleontologist: How to identify invertebrate skeleton fossils in a sedimentary rock near you

Dr. Zachary Morris 

(Dinosaur Institute, Natural History Museum of LA County) 

New Bone, Who This? How a tiny bone revealed Nanotyrannus wasn't just a teenage T. rex

Josh Anadu (Caltech Geological and Planetary Sciences)

A crash course on the big five mass extinctions of the Phanerozoic Eon

Fumnanya Abuah (USC Department of Earth Sciences)

 What metagenomics of microbial populations in Svalbard can tell us about the organic matter cycling in environments warming rapidly due to climate change